Eric Lipton
speaker
759 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Aug
Eric Lipton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's true that the company had started working with the Biden administration to try to see whether or not there were metals in Kazakhstan that it could tap into.
And so it did have a relationship with the federal government that predated Trump's return to office.
But once Howard Lutnick became the Commerce Secretary, he became an enormous advocate of this company.
And he actually wrote a letter to the president of Kazakhstan, repeatedly urging the president of Kazakhstan to pick this one company to be their partner to open the mine there for tungsten.
And so it was a bit of an open question as to why the United States was so intensely embracing this one company.
And that was part of what we were examining in our investigation.
I mean the more we looked into it, what we learned is that not only was the company working with the Trump administration but that separately through investment partners that it was working with Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
through a series of other limited liability corporations.
And that separately, one of the business partners in the deal had turned to Howard Lutnick's sons to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in capital at the same time as Howard Lutnick was involved in negotiating access by these executives to the mine.
So what we found was that there were family connections financially to the business partners involved in the same deal.
I mean that gets a little bit farther than the evidence that I have.
What I know is that they were teamed up with this company called Domonari Securities, which is based in Trump Tower in New York, and that they became investors in a limited liability company that was looking to invest in the critical mineral sector.
And around the same time as Howard Lutnick and the president were involved in negotiating access to this mine, they made their first investment in the company that is now called Kaz Resources.
It is certainly odd to see that the sons of the president were actually invested in a company that the president himself was involved in helping get this deal in Kazakhstan.
And it's why we wrote that story.
I think the net result of all of these financial transactions, the permutations that were next to impossible to track was that it did obscure who the investors were.
And it takes a lot of effort to try to figure out the sequence of transformations of these various corporate entities.
I mean, it was crazy.
They purchased this tiny Hong Kong-based road building company that was nearly bankrupt in
And they purchased it because it was NASDAQ traded.
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